Version 2.1.7

[meganothing]

If we go your route, we could also add:
"Multiple planets goes against the whole game: Factorio is all about expansion of a single planet"

I love space age 2.1 the way it is right now and would not change it. (All personal gripes are part of the base game)

But there is one thing about this point you brought up in particular that I have to agree on. The new Planets made Nauvis Outposts almost completely useless, and I loved outpost building in the base game.

Add to that the ridiculous amount of Mining Productivity you can get from Biolabs and Big/Quality Drills, and you will basically not run out of Ore for months and years, without going outside of the "Map Preview" Area you saw when starting your World.

The Logistics of having a long Train line, leading to a part of the Map you may need to supply with things on a regular basis to defend against Biters, giving you the opportunity to have a train with dozens of wagons going back to the original Base, was awesome and I miss that.

I agree partly. Space Age condensed Nauvis to a much smaller role so that the whole game doesn't take 3 times as long as a base game (according to the devs this was a goal) in 1.0 would. So one of the central best evolved parts of the base game can't shine as much as it did.
But on the other hand A) the base game is still there to be played, B) if you don't rush into space and start with quality research as soon as possible (something I did in my first space age game) you still get to do a nauvis base with lots of outposts, and C) it is still a sandbox, you can decide what do do on Nauvis and what not.

[meganothing]

So you say Space Age should not have embraced new concepts but just delivered some more of the same? Similar to the Fifa series for example. Very safe for change-averse players who want to pay for reskins every year.
I assume lots of players wanted to see really new stuff, concepts and problems, including me.

I read the argument the other way , space casino was part of the new concept, or the new "exercise design", or the challenge you could decide to tackle, but the change to balance them away from the game is felt you are left for quality with "more of the same". Space Platforms have that space constraint where more tiles means more fuel consumption and more area to cover with turret, and no robots rules which makes the design rules more "unique" or "different" than on the other planets. Only on Aquilo do you see robots being restricted somehow otherwise, and it's pretty light, and Aquilo isn't a place where you have a lot of raw ressources for doing quality.

Personally I don't need a forced restriction to ignore robots if I have fun with restricted building. In my games I usually use robots for very specific and restricted tasks. But that's me.

A more important point is that building platforms to reach other planets "efficiently" already gives the player a task where he is forced to work without robots. And optionally there are tasks like promethium processing you can do directly on the platforms if you want. While it would have been nice to have one further optional task there, it was never the only one to push you to design platforms, and with the new features of 2.1 maybe some more optional tasks emerged.

By the way, I don't see your point reflected anywhere in the OPs point. Maybe it is a point you wanted to make!?

[GregoriusT]

A more important point is that building platforms to reach other planets "efficiently" already gives the player a task where he is forced to work without robots.

You know you can just make big vertical rectangle or big square, and it would be as efficient as a compact platform? Once you have reached a certain width to achieve maximum asteroid collection efficiency, you can just extend the platform vertically as much as you need to process Asteroids. Not like Space Platform Flooring is expensive at all once you are either on Vulcanus or have Advanced Asteroid Processing from Gleba.

[mmmPI]

By the way, I don't see your point reflected anywhere in the OPs point. Maybe it is a point you wanted to make!?

Here is the part i read as "removing space casinos/refineries leads to a decrease in amount of different methods / making quality feels like "more of the same" from the post :

"Space refineries" were a great, satisfying way to engage with Quality, and it is a huge shame to see them go just to force more wasteful recycling.

Personally I don't need a forced restriction to ignore robots if I have fun with restricted building. In my games I usually use robots for very specific and restricted tasks. But that's me.

It's not a forced restriction for the sake of it, i just want to highlight that space platform being the only place where you can't use robots, dealing with quality on them makes up for a unique challenge in the game. I'm not talking about self imposed challenge. Disincentivizing players from attempt to upcycle quality asteroids has the imo detrimental effect to incentivize player toward the use of robots, there isn't this nice niche in the game anymore where a player can feel rewarded for handling the 1 stack sized chunk of all 3 types of asteroids of all 5 level of quality with belts only. Instead you're made to process the asteroids chunks and deal with the ore as you would on "any other planet". There is not this "late game dream build for quality making". That other stuff that can gives a feeling of "yes i have the ultimate platform now" which for now is somewhat only falling only on the thrusters of the promethium space platform. It's like one less wing for my dragon. One less dream to pursue, one less machine to over-engineered, "because some players felt it was too good to use", but like who care , the fun is in the designing, make it less good to use or later achievable idk, but why kill it ? If everyone didn't need a forced restriction to not spoil their own fun, we wouldn't be there in the first place I didn't need a total cancellation or removal or interdiction of it, i wasn't using it all the games, far from it, but it was there and now it's not :p

[mmmPI]

A more important point is that building platforms to reach other planets "efficiently" already gives the player a task where he is forced to work without robots.

You know you can just make big vertical rectangle or big square, and it would be as efficient as a compact platform? Once you have reached a certain width to achieve maximum asteroid collection efficiency, you can just extend the platform vertically as much as you need to process Asteroids. Not like Space Platform Flooring is expensive at all once you are either on Vulcanus or have Advanced Asteroid Processing from Gleba.

You still have to do all the routing logic to make sure the undesired material are voided or sent to the proper machine, having a lot of space isn't the same as being allowed to use robots. You can't just "add more bots to help with throughput", if when changing modules you start to encounter some clogging issue. And you can't use chest either, to read their content and use logic or handle the buffer, you only have belts or cargobay where asteroids chunks stack poorly.

Using robots simplify a lot the logic because otherwise you can have recycler attached to requester chest recycling "everything above 4000" or something, and eventually just with 1 machine and simple copy paste, you will have all the material you need/want in legendary.

[GregoriusT]

You still have to do all the routing logic to make sure the undesired material are voided or sent to the proper machine, having a lot of space isn't the same as being allowed to use robots. You can't just "add more bots to help with throughput", if when changing modules you start to encounter some clogging issue. And you can't use chest either, to read their content and use logic or handle the buffer, you only have belts or cargobay where asteroids chunks stack poorly.

Using robots simplify a lot the logic because otherwise you can have recycler attached to requester chest recycling "everything above 4000" or something, and eventually just with 1 machine and simple copy paste, you will have all the material you need/want in legendary.

So uhh, you cant just like, use one long input belt with all your crushers attached to it, with a single inserter at the end to dump any asteroid that reaches the end of that long belt?

Then just feed the output asteroids back into the long belt with a splitter that filters for legendary quality to do your final crushing products near the Hub.

This is the simplest wire-free no-clog solution i could think of, and you can just spam it a few times on your platform and be done with it, zero challenge at all, compared to the challenge of getting the platform itself to work.

And under normal circumstances, as long as you have enough crushers along the long belt, it will never actually throw any asteroids out unless your planetary cargo landing pad is already full or so.

[meganothing]

A more important point is that building platforms to reach other planets "efficiently" already gives the player a task where he is forced to work without robots.

You know you can just make big vertical rectangle or big square, and it would be as efficient as a compact platform? Once you have reached a certain width to achieve maximum asteroid collection efficiency, you can just extend the platform vertically as much as you need to process Asteroids. Not like Space Platform Flooring is expensive at all once you are either on Vulcanus or have Advanced Asteroid Processing from Gleba.

I know. See mmmPI's post for an answer to this.

And just like almost all the problems of Nauvis in 1.0 could be almost trivially solved as well through throwing more area and machines or more time at it, the space platform problems are trivially solvable with a crude design just copied or extended a few times. But nobody wants to do this, we all want an efficient effective beautiful design to some degree. The developers seem to agree when they initially made quality a requirement: "This was somewhat intentional, when designing 2.0 and feeling out the balancing, we knew some things would be tougher if you didn't have quality items, such as Space platform design. Having a few high quality solar panels, accumulators, or such, made a big impact on the effectivity of Platforms.". Instead of using quality panels for example just more panels would solve those problems as well, but nobody seems to accept this as a good solution.

[meganothing]

By the way, I don't see your point reflected anywhere in the OPs point. Maybe it is a point you wanted to make!?

Here is the part i read as "removing space casinos/refineries leads to a decrease in amount of different methods / making quality feels like "more of the same" from the post :

"Space refineries" were a great, satisfying way to engage with Quality, and it is a huge shame to see them go just to force more wasteful recycling.

Ah, thanks. Though I don't have an informed opinion on this point yet (i.e. whether the space casino is an interesting new problem for example) as I have not tried out space casinos myself yet. I only objected to the point I was actually quoting which was defining what Factorio is supposed to be about and declaring waste aka "throwing away perfectly good items" as un-factorily.

[mmmPI]

So uhh, you cant just like, use one long input belt with all your crushers attached to it, with a single inserter at the end to dump any asteroid that reaches the end of that long belt?
Then just feed the output asteroids back into the long belt with a splitter that filters for legendary quality to do your final crushing products near the Hub.
This is the simplest wire-free no-clog solution i could think of, and you can just spam it a few times on your platform and be done with it, zero challenge at all, compared to the challenge of getting the platform itself to work.
And under normal circumstances, as long as you have enough crushers along the long belt, it will never actually throw any asteroids out unless your planetary cargo landing pad is already full or so.

it depend on which version of the game we are talking i think lol , i would say no you can't do that, because if you use a single inserter at the end, you hardly cap the amount of chunk that can be thrown to space, and when you research asteroid productivity, the amount of generated extra chunk by the all the crusher will outmatch that capacity eventually causing the system to be super slow. ( but this is because i haven't quite adopted the removal of the productivity bonus just yet ).

But really there is something else, if you don't have a way to throw away some of the legendary stuff, as soon as you have too much say "iron" , then the other "coal" will back up. The final filter crushing product near the hub needs extension or logic to guarantee the no clogging.

Not having robots is making quality anything more of a puzzle i don't think you are disagreeing with this ? I understand your reaction as meaning something like the logistic isn't necessarily the part that creates the "unbalance", it's like beyond the "difficulty" label, it's not that any of the method is particularly "difficult" be it even without robots, but rather the yield/rate are (were in 2.0) "too good" for space casino that robots or not the "umbalance was there".

I know. See mmmPI's post for an answer to this.

There is a bug is the matrix sir, the answer was not written yet, only the part that raised the question but i tried my best to adress a respectful answer, if we are going to share it x).

Ah, thanks. Though I don't have an opinion on this point yet (i.e. whether the space casino is an interesting new problem for example) as I have not tried out space casinos myself yet. I only objected to the point I was actually quoting which was defining what Factorio is supposed to be about and declaring waste aka "throwing away perfectly good items" as un-factorily.

It's not ! It's an interesting "old" problem, but i know fashion is cyclic so maybe it will be hyped again in the future, rebranded and all new, maybe packaged as a player mod x)
I see the specific of space casino as mixing the absence of robots AND the quality system, it's not your only reason to work without robots, but it may very well be the one where "by design" quality can't be used with robots, the only place in the game. It's still possible to do space casinos, if we consider "taking common asteroid and outputing legendary material", but it involve now ( i may be missing strategies) doing a similar build as you would do on a planet, you don't really get any particular reward for doing so on a platform "without robots", you don't get access to "space strategies" as you could decide before to have your quality come from Vulcanus, or Fulgora, or Gleba :s or "space", now that "space" part for quality is something some players would consider dead or nerfed , or "removed" from the game.

I feel it's interesting if you try to understand how it works and the math behind it, you are setting up your own casino. I feel it is like a math lesson on how to use probabilities and law of large numbers to one's advantage and after you've made one, you understand how casino works or something. I feel robots allows to "hide" the complexity, you can just make more machines and just read the numbers on a large roboport networks, so you don't necessarily need to understand as much what's going on , you don't need to insure yourself all the proper ways the different quality material needs to go.

[GregoriusT]

My internal reasoning is actually more funny than you might've guessed.

Using Logistics Chests for Quality is HARDER than just using Belts. And that is because one reason:

You will be forced to build more and more and more Storage Chests to contain the Quality Items or else your ENTIRE LOGISTICS BOT BASE will grind to a standstill to the point that even Construction Bots MIGHT have trouble dealing with it if you are REALLY unlucky. (even with the >4000 recycling trick, you might end up with such a large variety of items you get flooded regardless)

That is why i strongly prefer having belt based quality setups, so the quality intermediates wont flood the Logistics System.